Store Events - May 22, 7:30 p.m.


Time: Thursday, May 22, 2008 7:30 p.m.
Location: the store
Title of Event: Jennie Shortridge presents Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe


Written with keen insight and wit, Jennie Shortridge's fiction is "rich, funny, sad, sensual, and hopeful." Now comes Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe, a bittersweet novel that asks: How does a good girl know when to finally let herself be bad?

Mira Serafino can see the headlines now: Girl-Scout-Leading, Homeless-Feeding Science Teacher of the Year Goes on Wild Rampage of Sex, Drinking, and Drugs. Well, let her small town of Pacifica, Oregon think what it will. Forty-five-year-old Mira, the obedient daughter, the supermom, the loyal wife, has left the building…

When she learns that her college-sweetheart husband has been seeing another woman, Mira's perfect world is shattered and she wants no one, least of all her big Italian family, to know. She heads north — with no destination and little money — stopping only when her car breaks down in Seattle. She takes a job at the offbeat Coffee Shop at the Center of the Universe, where she'll experience a scary but invigorating freedom, and meet someone she'll come to love: the new Mira.